Who really discovered America?

Constantinople.

 

A distant second.

 

Really? What building did this city have to compare to the Agia Sophia?

 

I agree with you but architectural design is subjective

 

so you're definitely in a minority for native people trusting DNA results...I understand the distrust the native population has had with anthropologists/scientists in the past but genetics is the best thing yet for indigenous populations...

 

I don't agree that architectural design is subjective. There are styles and fashions and architecture, like all art, is an expression of the human spirit. Architecture is public and expresses and shapes the spirit of the people of a culture.

And I, for one, am willing to make judgments about cultures and the Aztecs rate poorly. They were certainly civilized and their architecture displays an advanced and highly organized civilization. But I find Aztec civilization repulsive.

They practiced human sacrifice. Europeans and Asians were brutal but their religions weren't brutal. The Aztecs were deeply brutal and their architecture and other art reflects that brutality.

I do not regret their civilization being obliterated.

 

As far as western culture is concern it was indeed Columbus without question.

If the Vikings had set up a more permanent settlement instead of maybe a short visit settlement then a case could had been made for them to be the discoverers.

As far as first humans that is beyond the veil of time and even with DNA and research into such things as arrow heads designs likely never to be known in details.

Hell it was a dozen Americans who first visit the moon but it will be the first human settlers whoever they might be who will matter.

 

Doesn't matter. The winners write the history.

 

There is always a first man to find new lands but they are seldom known to the rest of us.

Here is one of the very best of Kipling poems that cover such men.

 

art is subjective, architecture is sculpture/art on a large scale and completely subjective...whether you or I like it or not is irrelevant...

obviously you're not an anthropologist...each civilization is judged in it's own time period and circumstance...the same could be said about Roman, Mongol, Ottoman or Chinese civilizations but each needs to be judged with respect to their time period standards, they all had their repulsive aspects but you choose to ignore those details...

european and asian religions weren't brutal???? not only are you not an anthropologist you're no historian either...Romans practiced butchery for family entertainment....millions upon millions died in old world religious wars and pogroms...Aztecs were no worse than many other civilizations and certainly no less brutal than the Spanish who defeated them...

 

Its not irrelevant to me. I have a different philosophy. I am not a nihilist. Truth and beauty are objective and it is humanities task to discover that truth and that beauty.

Obviously not. I am not a cultural relativist.

But I am a historian. Asians and Europeans were brutal but Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism are not. They did not practice human sacrifice.

The Pre-Columbian religions all did.

That to me seems to be a significant difference and one that reflects badly on the pre-Columbian civilizations. You, wearing your cultural relativist hat, are indifferent as to whether a religion practices human sacrifice.

---------------

But you have argued that you can't compare cultures at all. You started out stating that the Aztec city was somehow better than any European one, then stated you can't compare cultures.

Now you are saying that the Aztecs are no worse than others as if you could make a value judgment.

Please decide whether or not you can make a value judgment.

 

Then I suggest you look more into it.

The Haplogroup R1 is almost exclusively Western European, and is especially strong in the North-East American native groupings. And the Inuet DNA has more in common with European DNA than Eskimo DNA does. In fact, the Haplogroup R shows strongly that it did not come from Asia because that grouping is not native to that region of the world, and has never existed there.

And where it appears in North America, is smack dab in the groups in the area of the Hudson Bay. And it decreases the further away from the bay you move.



No, the more it is looked into every year the more that favor that the Continent was populated over a great many waves if migrating humans. Some from the East, most from the West.

But only the most foolish of scientist (and none I have ever read) would claim there was "zero genetic evidence", especially since there is a lot of it.

 

you're misreading what the data shows...no area and no people are untouched by genetic transfer, regardless how isolated a people may seen to be they've had a genetic transfer...what you're seeing is evidence of europeans and indigenous people boinking each other for the last 500yrs, european explorers and trappers have been in those regions for a long time and they like their sex..so what you're seeing is not the result of ancient european expansion across the atlantic...genetic exchange due to sex works very quickly, every european is estimated to have a genetic connection with each other through sex in the 1,500yrs...globally it has been estimated as little as 3,500yrs...

genetic analysis show 15 founding mitochondrial types not found in asia or europe and they all originated in Beringia, the indigenous people show less genetic variation than anywhere else in the world....one low estimate suggests all the indigenous peoples may have originated from a group as small as 250 individuals...

you may not like it but there is zero genetic evidence for any other people but the indigenous population being the only founding people of the americas...

 

The Solutreans were probably the first humans to discover North America. What eventually happened to them is a mystery. Did climate change wipe them out or were they exterminated by groups arriving from Asia? We don't really know.

 

Me.

 

Depends on what you mean by discover? There's been evidence uncovered that the Phoenicians were mining copper from the great lakes region 6,000 or so years ago.

https://grahamhancock.com/wakefieldjs1/

Then who peopled the Americans, they probably came from Siberia around 15,000-20,000 years ago.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-first-americans/

But there has been some other evidence that Polynesians reached the shores of south America either by accident or on purpose some 25,000 years ago. Pending some DNA testing.

 

that absolutely did enter of siberia, there wasn't a significant debate on this before among anthropologists...since DNA testing became available all doubt disappeared and any debate killed by the evidence....Polynesians 25K years ago? Polynesians began their occupation of western Pacific 3,000 yrs ago and reached Easter Island the most eastern Island closest to S America about 1,000years ago....

so until there is genetic evidence to overturn the findings, the indigenous people of the Americas were the first and only settlers until the arrival of the Vikings

 

Here is the most prominent theory:
"Around 20,000 years ago a small group of these Asian hunters headed into the face of the storm, entering the East Asian Arctic during the Last Glacial Maximum. At this time the great ice sheets covering the far north had literally sucked up much of the Earth’s moisture in their vast expanses of white wasteland, dropping sea levels by more than 300 feet. This exposed a land bridge that connected the Old World to the New, joining Asia to the Americas. In crossing it, the hunters had made the final great leap of the human journey. By 15,000 years ago they had penetrated the land south of the ice, and within 1,000 years they had made it all the way to the tip of South America. Some may have even made the journey by sea."
https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/human-journey/

 

that's how it appears, it's rather astounding that they expanded to all the way to the tip of S America in only 1000 years...it would seem there were coastal cultures that sped the expansion south and from western coastal settlements spread east...

 

Well, there were no humans on the North American continent prior to about 15,000 years ago. The neanderthals were in Europe while the denosivans were in Asia.

 

They probably skirted the coast in boats.
"Another debate centers on the migrants’ mode of transport. Some researchers believe Beringia was flooded by rising sea levels before its inhabitants had the chance to cross into Alaska. Challenging the idea that the land bridge was the only route in, they say groups must have ferried themselves in boats at least part of the way. This seafaring theory is supported by evidence of human occupation in Chile by 14,500 years ago. Such rapid progress from the Arctic, all the way down through South America, is difficult to explain if the colonizers had to wait for corridors to open up in the ice sheets that overlaid the land route through Canada. Southward excursions down the Pacific Coast by boat would have been a much quicker way of covering the distance.

Backing for this argument has been found in the form of ancient DNA extracted from a 10,300-year-old tooth from Alaska’s Prince of Wales Island. Researchers found that only one percent of modern indigenous people they sampled matched the tooth’s genetic markers, but those who did lived primarily along the Pacific Coast, between Chile and California."
https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/land-bridge/

 

the results of a study on coastal expansion have been publicized by the media in the last month or so...tests on glacial formations along the NW coast appear to verify the coast was indeed ice free and teaming with with wild life sufficient to sustain a coastal route long before the interior corridor became available...

 

Yes. Natives lives here for thousands of years in a sustainable way. European colonizers totally messed that up with "civilization". Can't find clean water, but we have lots of cool gadgets! Can't find clean air? Sorry. And I am ignoring the brutality of the so-called civilized Europeans who wiped out 8 million indigenous North American people while using African slave labor. Great civilized people...SMDH

 

That is not true.
Ben Franklin basically modeled the Articles of Confederation, the early version of the US Constitution, after the Great Law of Peace, the constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy.

IROQUOIS CONSTITUTION: A FORERUNNER TO COLONISTS' DEMOCRATIC PRINCIPLES

https://www.nytimes.com/1987/06/28/...unner-to-colonists-democratic-principles.html

 

Probably both.

More and more discoveries in Central and South America are showing more and more that there were likely many individual waves of humans moving to the Americas. We have some fossils now being dated to over 20,000 years old, and possibly to even over 100,000 years.

The Clovis People is just one of many that predated the Land Bridge. In fact, for almost a century the "Clovis First" theory has now largely crumbled, with archaeologists now accepting that there were many waves, each one distinct from the other.

Odds are the previous waves went the way of Clovis. Largely dying off as the climate continued to change around them, then later either breeding with or being replaced by the latter waves that followed. Not unlike the fate of Neanderthal in most of the world.

Thanks to genetics it is now realized that Neanderthal never really became "extinct", it lives on in us. It was a recent off-shoot of the Homo line, and was simply absorbed into the Homo Sapiens.